Most of the time in Magic: The Gathering, a card’s popularity is directly tied to its power level. The community loves an underdog, however, which leads to many ‘meme’ cards, like Colossal Dreadmaw, for instance, growing hugely popular despite being notoriously underpowered. It’s the art and flavor of these cards, instead, that earns them a spot in the hearts of players.
Slime Against Humanity is definitely one such card. While it’s not offensively bad, it’s also never really broken out competitively. Today, however, Bnpbnp piloted a Mono-Green Counters deck running the card to a 5-0 finish in the MTG Online Pauper League. This could be a breakthrough moment both for Slime itself, and for Mono-Green Counters as an archetype.
Mono-Green Counters In MTG Pauper
Mono-Green Counters isn’t a wholly original deck for MTG Pauper, but it is one we’ve only seen fleeting glimpses of in the past. A handful of players have tried to make it work over the years, but the results have been underwhelming. Bnpbnp’s 5-0 League result today, for this reason, is well worth paying attention to.
The build they went for here is, in many ways, a conventional one. It focuses on getting multiple cheap creatures out with +1/+1 counters on them, and then leverages the Proliferate mechanic to boost them into major threats. Experiment One naturally accrues counters over time, while Skarrgan Pit-Skulk can enter with a counter if you’re already applying pressure.
Moving further up the curve, Duskshell Crawler is one of the most important creatures in the deck. Not only does it place a +1/+1 counter on a creature on entry, but it also gives all your creatures with +1/+1 counters Trample. Other than Skarrgan Pit-Skulk, the creatures in this deck largely lack evasion, so this is a vital piece against decks like Mono-White Aggro that gum up the board.
Once it has a few becountered creatures out, Bnpbnp’s list then starts dipping into Proliferate. Both Thirsting Roots and Smell Fear offer the effect at a very reasonable price, letting you build up your board position quickly. With Crawler in play, it’s not difficult for the deck to assemble a board of beefy Tramplers and swing for early lethal. Proliferate is a bit of a ‘win more’ mechanic by nature, but Thirsting Roots can grab you lands, and Smell Fear can serve as removal if you’re not quite in a lethal position yet.
Time For Slime
Bnpbnp’s big innovation with their MTG Pauper Mono-Green Counters deck is the introduction of a token sub-theme. This is where the much-beloved Slime Against Humanity comes in. The card serves as a solid evasive threat, and one which scales up over time as you cast more copies, lending the deck crucial late-game inevitability.
Slime Against Humanity also supports one of the deck’s sneaky powerhouse cards, Cloakwood Swarmkeeper. This is a scaling one-drop like Experiment One, but it gains counters when you drop tokens instead of bigger creatures. This is a difficult ask in most decks, but with eight copies of Slime Against Humanity in here, it’s much easier than you’d think. The deck can also produce tokens via Nest Invader and Eldrazi Repurposer, which further supports Swarmkeeper. These cards also offer chump blockers or a mana boost as needed.
The Eldrazi Spawn tokens from this pair have the additional advantage of turning Hunger of the Howlpack into a truly absurd card. When you can easily sacrifice a Spawn to turn on Morbid, this becomes a permanent Giant Growth with bonus synergy on top. Slapping this on an Ooze token or a Skarrgan Pit-Skulk will put a pretty short clock on the game for your opponent, and you can further support this all-in strategy with Snakeskin Veil.
With these tools, Mono-Green Counters is able to go tall as well as wide. This elevates it beyond a simple, linear Aggro deck into something more well-rounded and better prepared for the diverse players in the current Pauper metagame.
Success At Last?
Even with Bnpbnp’s fresh build, Mono-Green Counters isn’t a sure thing in MTG Pauper. The big players in the format right now all offer unique challenges, which the deck won’t always be able to overcome.
In the case of Madness Burn, the issue is that the deck is simply faster than Mono-Green Counters a lot of the time. It can make strong early starts on the board, and it can go over the top of your big creatures later with its direct burn spells. In race scenarios, Sneaky Snacker also serves as a hugely useful tool, both on offense and defense.
Jund Wildfire and Mono-Blue Terror are more balanced matchups. In the case of Wildfire, both decks are pursuing a very similar game plan in building up big creatures with counters. Mono-Green is able to do so quicker, however, which puts it at an advantage in the early game. It also has Smell Fear, and Horrific Assault out of the sideboard, to deal with Writhing Chrysalis and Gixian Infiltrator when they become problems.
Mono-Blue Terror can be tough if they land an early Tolarian Terror or Cryptic Serpent, but you also have the capacity to out-scale both of them fairly easily in many games. Terror isn’t flush with removal, so your fight spells should swing things your way later on.
Overall, Bnpbnp’s new take on Mono-Green Counters feels fairly well-placed right now. Hopefully it catches on in the weeks to come; it’d be nice to have a non-Elves Mono-Green deck be viable in Pauper, after all.
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